Utilities must invest sustained effort into hiring and training talented energy management system (EMS) engineers or risk being left with critical vacancies, attendees at a NERC online conference heard Thursday.

Speaking to NERC’s Monitoring and Situational Awareness technical conference, Stacen Tyskiewicz, manager of the EMS group at Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), likened the chances of finding a suitable EMS engineer to “buying the winning lottery ticket,” citing the range of skills needed.

EMS engineers are charged with supporting the systems used by utilities to monitor, control and optimize the grid, with responsibilities including analysis, engineering, design, implementation and operations and maintenance. The job also requires an understanding of programming, cybersecurity and other matters that may be required in a rapidly changing environment.

Stacen Tyskiewicz, Bonneville Power Administration | NERC

“Engineering, programing, cybersecurity operations — all those are … different disciplines entirely. So, we’re looking for this highly specialized job [with a] very small talent pool to choose from,” Tyskiewicz said. “And even if you’re lucky enough to find somebody who knows all of those things, then you’ll most likely have to teach them about your EMS vendor and about any unique requirements of your service territory.”

Even if candidates with the right intersection of skills can be found, working to keep the lights on for millions of customers poses a special set of challenges, and managers can’t tell how a candidate will react to that pressure until they are put in the situation.

“My first time being on the dispatch floor by myself, my mentor was out of town … and I had to go down on the dispatch floor to answer a question,” Tyskiewicz said. “And [my colleague] asked me when something would be ready, and I told him, and he slammed his fist on the desk and screamed, ‘The lights will be out in Seattle by then!’ So that kind of pressure is not something that, in general, electrical engineers or programmers are used to dealing with.”

Short- and Long-term Solutions

With utilities around the country competing for such a scarce resource, how can one entity lure the talent it needs? In the short term, Tyskiewicz advised, there are several strategies that can help.

First, an entity can try to meet its needs with multiple hires instead of trying to get all the needed skills in one employee: for example, by pairing an electrical engineer with a programmer. This solution is more complicated from a payroll perspective and Tyskiewicz admitted she had not tried it herself but said she has heard of it being successful.

Another option is to “pilfer from your [EMS] vendor” by hiring their engineers, though if the vendor finds out a customer is doing this it could strain the relationship. Utilities may also attempt to outsource the problem to an outside consulting firm if a suitable partner can be found. However, this too is usually more expensive than hiring the right talent directly.

Yet another choice is to entice recently retired EMS engineers, or those who are on the verge of retiring, to come back or stay until the entity can build up enough fresh talent. This requires trading on the “dedication [and] devotion to keeping the lights on” that experienced staff will likely have.

Longer-term solutions can include hiring electrical engineers with some of the needed skills and training them on the job; this can be done through outside channels, such as job fairs and industry conferences, or within the organization. Utilities may also try to lighten the workload on existing EMS engineers by removing as much work as possible that can be done by others, allowing them to focus on the areas where they are needed most. Hiring more non-engineers, such as cybersecurity specialists, programmers and technical writers, can help with this.

At BPA, Tyskiewicz said, the most productive solution turned out to be to “grow your own” by establishing a robust EMS staffing strategy with firm support from management. Like every approach, getting executives to buy into the strategy took time and work. But in the end the effort paid off, as BPA’s leaders understood the risks of operating without sufficient EMS engineering talent and the investment needed beyond the initial hire.

Growing a sufficient internal EMS talent pool means establishing strong internal training programs, but even more important is fostering a culture where current professionals with 30 or more years’ experience can pass their knowledge on to the new generation.

“These engineers enjoy their job, they learn, and they just end up collecting a tremendous amount of wisdom,” Tyskiewicz said. “And that wisdom is not something you can put in a flowchart; it’s not something you can put in a document or even in a video recording. You need to have them [ready] for those situations that only pop up but once every five or 10 years. And they’re not going to know how to do that if they don’t have somebody to talk to who’s done it before.”